How to Figure Out What People Want

In my piece last week about five new thinking styles for working with thinking machines, I wrote about why it is important, in the age of AI, to think in terms of sequences rather than essences: learning to cope with dynamic contexts rather than trying to locate fixed, discoverable truths. This week I’m covering a practical application of this thinking style. 

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A common piece of startup advice from the last 10-15 years is: "Make something people want." It resonates because it effectively distills the core job of a founder into a phrase. Unfortunately, it’s not very actionable. It’s sort of like telling an investor: “Beat the market.” 

In both of these cases, the obvious next question is: “How?”

A dominant framework for thinking about this question is to consider customer needs. Under this worldview, people simply buy the products they need. Or to put it another way, they “hire” products to do specific jobs for them. 

If you use this framework, you often implicitly adopt the view that people have an objective, discoverable set of problems that they need solved. And that if you look closely enough, you can map out those problems, connect them to needs, and thereby identify products to build.

This is a scientific approach to the building of products. Something previously mysterious becomes an empirical activity: You go out and discover needs, and then create ways to fulfill them. This means talking to customers—on the street, through surveys, on the internet, in bars—however and wherever you can find them. 

A naive way to do this is to grab a potential customer by the collar and straight-up ask them, “What do you want?” Any experienced founder can tell you this doesn’t normally work. You get shrugs or, if you’re in Manhattan, the occasional, “A fuckin’ raise!” 

People don’t have a list of needs at hand. 

Instead, an experienced founder acts more like an ethnographer. Their goal is to build up a detailed understanding of their target customer: what they do when they wake up in the morning, how they go through their inbox, and how they respond when they see that their boss replied to their long, detailed, late-night email with the single word “No.” The idea is to be objective. You ask questions to gather neutral data. That data tells you the truth about the world. You don’t want to fool yourself with leading questions and trying to confirm your priors.

But as any experienced founder knows, this process is fractal.

The deeper you get into asking questions about a person’s day, the more detail there is to observe. And true needs or jobs—the ones that are burning or unfulfilled—get lost in the process of mapping the infinite contours of an individual life.

What actually works? Drop the objectivity. Instead, lead with a particular idea or bias. Once you present to a customer your own view of the world or a perspective on what you intend to build, everything changes. Suddenly, the squishy mess inside their head hardens into visibility. It’s like a non-Newtonian fluid subjected to force: a liquid until you press on it with the strength of your own perspective.

You’ve probably had an analogous experience in other areas of your life. Consider the question: “What do you want for dinner?” Or, “Which movie do you want to watch?” Or, “What kind of article do you want to read?”